Ashes to ashes, Dusty to dust

On May 1, the Cubs beat the Pirates 2-1 to move to 14-10 on the season, and 5-5 in ten games without the injured Derrek Lee. Greg Maddux was 5-0; Ryan Dempster had just recorded his seventh save in as many chances and his team record 26th straight since 2005.

On June 1, the Cubs could potentially be as many as 16 games under .500. They have played 22 games in the past 23 days and have put up a record of 4-18 - and of the team's four wins, the resurgent Carlos Zambrano has three. Maddux is 0-4 in his last five starts, suddenly looking every day of 40. Dempster's save chances have been few and far between, but he has still blown two of his last three, including in a 5-4 loss to Florida on Tuesday. In the 22 games, the anemic Cubs offense has managed more than four runs just four times, while absorbing five shutouts.

There's a school of thought that says when a team doesn't have all its players healthy, it simply isn't fair to blame the manager for the team's poor performance. But Lee is the only player who started the season with the Cubs who isn't there now, and despite his Triple Crown-worthy stats last year, it defies logic to think that one player's absence can turn a team from division contenders into one of the two or three worst clubs in the entire league. (At present, three teams have worse records than the Cubs - Kansas City, Florida, and Pittsburgh - but as one of those three just swept the Cubs, it hardly seems unfair to suggest that the Cubs are worse, at least as of right now.) And what changed from those first ten games after Lee's injury, when the Cubs managed to play .500 ball even with Lee on the sidelines?

Sure, many of the players seem to be having bad seasons all at the same time. Juan Pierre, brought in to be the leadoff hitter the Cubs didn't have with Corey "Swing first, ask questions later" Patterson, is hitting .235, and his OBP is lower than Glendon Rusch's. (He's also got more than twice as many strikeouts as walks, and even though he wasn't brought in for power, 2 RBI is pretty sad.) Aramis Ramirez has 9 home runs and is tied for the team lead with 21 RBI, but he's still hitting just .232. Michael Barrett, whose .879 OPS leads the non-Lee contingent of the team by nearly 100 points, certainly faces at least a week's suspension sometime soon, and his backup Henry Blanco is hitting .051 - worse than almost every pitcher on the roster.

Either because or in spite of all this, reports run wild that Dusty Baker is on the hot seat, and they're probably not going to go away while the Cubs are losing like this, even as Jim Hendry - clearly a Baker guy - insists that Dusty is not in trouble and may even be extended as soon as the ship is righted. (Attach a big "if" on the front of that, though.)

Baker and Hendry have seemingly resigned themselves to the losing, however. I can appreciate that they avoided mortgaging the farm system further for a two-month first base rental, especially when the options were all mediocre, but the starting pitching has been a pretty consistent problem, with only Sean Marshall displaying any real chops among the rookies who have been tasked to start in lieu of attempting to pick up a veteran. Management continues to find every excuse in the book for why the team is failing except to look Baker's way.

Perhaps the key skirmish in this campaign came at NotComiskey on Saturday. Following Michael Barrett's admittedly ill-chosen punch of A.J. Pierzynski, it appears that not a single Cub was willing to defend Barrett in the press (with most of them simply explaining that they ran onto the field because everyone else did, as though Barrett's right hook had escaped their vision completely) with the exception of Rich Hill, who was promptly lambasted not just by tactless-as-ever Ozzie Guillen but by Baker and Hendry as well, and subsequently sent back to AAA. (To be fair, his pitching likely merited that move on its own, but no amount of insistence to the contrary can convince me that Hill's comments had nothing to do with the timing.)

Baker not only took Hill down, but he failed to come to Barrett's defense as well. I don't mean to suggest that Barrett should have punched Pierzynski - although if you think about it, it's kind of hard to blame him considering how obnoxious Pierzynski is - but how do you not back your guy up even a little bit if you're the manager? Even if it was a totally clean play (and regardless of whether it was or not, I can't help but feel that if Barrett had bowled over Pierzynski, Guillen would be backing up his guy and killing Barrett), it seems like it's Baker's responsibility to at least try and stand behind Barrett, something he could do without condoning his actions. Instead, Baker basically threw Barrett under the bus.

And sure enough, following an emotional win in the series finale, the Cubs promptly lost three in Florida. Maybe these were just "come-down losses" - but a sweep at the hands of the worst team in the NL? 9 runs allowed in two of the three games, and a ninth-inning blown save in the third?

I refuse to believe that this team can't win. Even with Lee out, even with Pierre and Ramirez not hitting very well, this team went 5-5 in their first ten games without him. They can win. I'm really starting to think, though, that they don't want to. Baker's tenure is starting to look more like Maury Wills' in Seattle in 1980-81 - 26-56 over parts of two seasons, unpopularity, and player hatred to the point where after a win one Mariner was heard to comment, "Hell, we screwed up - we won."

Do the Cubs players really want Baker fired? I don't know. He is a "player's manager," supposedly, although it bears noting that a lot of guys with that distinction never win crap because they can't ever be tough on their players. And as long as Hendry seems to be in his corner, nothing is going to change. But maybe something should change. We're in Year Four of the Baker Era now, and it's starting to become pretty clear that things peaked in Year One. If the Cubs finish the season in their current spot in the division, it'll be a worse finish every year under Baker - from 1 to 3 to 4 to 5. And we're going to talk contract extension?

Sure, in 2003 Baker took the Cubs as far as any manager since Charlie Grimm. In 1945, Grimm, too, was in his first full season as Cubs manager. The next year, the Cubs finished third. In 1947, sixth. In 1948, eighth. In 1949, they were on their way to another eighth place finish when Grimm was relieved of his duties.

That was Year Five of the Grimm Era. If Dusty Baker's tenure as Cubs manager is going to take a similar path, and especially if the players really have quit on him, there's no way he should be allowed to make it past Year Four.